New scoreboard coming to Paul Brown Tiger Stadium

Chris Easterling IndeOnline.com Sports Editor @ceasterlingINDE

Thursday

Jul 12, 2018 at 11:55 AM

Massillon upgrading to modern, LED video board this summer after 13 years with previous one.

MASSILLON Massillon's prided itself on having the best of everything when it comes to facilities, especially for football. One place where district administrators admit it had fallen behind was in terms of the scoreboard at Paul Brown Tiger Stadium.

That's not the case anymore.

Workers this week began the process of removing the current scoreboard at the stadium, which was installed prior to the 2005 season. It will be replaced by a more modern, LED video board, which is scheduled to be shipped from the Daktronics headquarters in Brookings, S.D., on Aug. 10.

"It was getting to the point where you can't even get replacement parts (for the old scoreboard) to fix the things that need fixed," Massillon head football coach and athletics director Nate Moore said. "The technology was that far out. So, we were really to the point where, to make an improvement, we had to purchase a new scoreboard."

The overall dimensions of the scoreboard - 81-feet-by-27-feet, 4-inches - will be the same size as the previous one, according to Bill Dorman, who is helping to head up the project for the Massillon Tiger Football Booster Club. It is the video board portion of the scoreboard, however, which will be an overwhelming feature of the new one, which is expected to be fully installed in time for the season opener Aug. 24 against St. Vincent-St. Mary.

The new video board will be roughly 69-feet-by-20-feet, 6-inches, according to Dorman. That video board will house all of the game-information pieces - score, time, down-and-distance, quarter, etc. - digitally, while being able to provide both replays and full-screen graphics.

The purchase of the scoreboard, which is expected to cost in the neighborhood of $800,000, was a combination of moneys from the Massillon City Schools, the Booster Club and various scoreboard sponsors. At its May 23 Board of Education meeting, the district entered into a partnership with the Booster Club to pay roughly $8,000 a year over a seven-year period.

Also, scoreboard sponsors are paying an average of $12,000 a year. The school board, at an April 26, 2017, meeting approved up $113,000 for the demolition of the old scoreboard and installation of the new one.

"Thank you to the Booster Club and all the different people who were involved in making that happen," Moore said. "That was a necessary purchase. I know for the North-South Game (in April), the quarters didn't work. You were starting to see things like that."

Many high schools in Northeast Ohio have moved to similar, if not smaller-scale, scoreboards. Jackson, Perry and Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium are among those in Stark County with such scoreboards, while Parma's Byers Field and Austintown Fitch's Greenwood Chevrolet Falcon Stadium also have them.

However, the scale of the one being installed at Paul Brown Tiger Stadium is expected to permit significantly more during the course of a game than most.

"At least from our perspective," said Dave Wagner, who has operated the Paul Brown Tiger Stadium scoreboard since 2005, and has worked on the Cleveland Browns' video board crew for the past four years. "It's going to be a lot more information. A lot more really cool things we can do in certain situations. To be able to basically take over the whole board when we have a touchdown and be able to take it over with the whole 'touchdown' graphic and then, once it's done, go back to the in-game information, is really something else."

Wagner stated the exact setup for how the stat panels on the scoreboard will look is being worked on now. His hope is to use one of the two panels to provide in-game statistics, and even the potential for out-of-town scores.

Wagner said he won't be able to work with the new technology until early in the week leading up to the opener. He admitted there may be some opening-night glitches as the scoreboard crew gets the hang of the technology, and also expected to overall presentation to improve as the season progresses.

The space the new scoreboard's technology will take up in the west press box at the stadium remains uncertain, although Wagner expected it to require some re-configuring. A total of five individuals will be required to run the board - Wagner, a replay person, a game-clock operator, play-clock operator and game-stat operator - which is only an addition of one person from before.

The 13-year span between the installation of the previous scoreboard and the new one is the same time frame which existed between the the last two scoreboards utilized. The 2005 scoreboard replaced a version which had been installed in 1992, according to the Massillon Tiger Football Booster Club web site.

Reach Chris at 330-775-1128 or chris.easterling@indeonline.com.

On Twitter: @ceasterlingINDE

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